Hi guys, glad you found this. I guess if you found this then your having a wee bit bother with Railroads. I found that under Vista it started to crash from anywhere between 30 secs and 15 mins. From trolling through countless sites I have discovered it was mainly due to a memory allocation problem. I have patched the original executable file to fix this. I have no idea why Firaxis couldn't do this as it only took me about 3 minutes. Thats not a dig at you guys, why do it when someone else already has, I know! Available at the bottom of my rambling there are some files that some of you have said were missing, i.e the bink32.dll. Click on the link below for this. Install intructions in the zip file. Please feel free to email me (link at the bottom) and let me know how it went!
First things first, please make sure your hardware / computer / girlfriend or what ever you call it meets the minimum required specifications to play the game as detailed below.
Intel Pentium 1.4Ghz or AMD Athlon processor or equivelent.
512 MB RAM.
64 MB Video Card with hardware pixel and vertex shaders (GeForce 3, Radeon 8500 or better).
DirectX 7 compatiblie sound card.
CD-ROM Drive.
1.7GB of hard drive space.
Next, make sure that your drivers are all up to date. You probably already have done this so can probably ignore this part!
This patch was made from the original executable for the game after the game was patched to version 1.1. This means for the download below to work you too will need to update your version to 1.1. The v1.1 patch is available
here.
Okay, first download this.
Patched Executable. (7.0 mb)
Next scan the file for viruses. Not that I would but you can never be too careful. This is the internet you know!
Now back up the original version of the games executable. Extract the new executable and copy and paste the new executable that you downloaded into the original installation folder. Now right click on the executable, select properties and select compatibility and select 'run as Windows XP Service Pack 2' and tick 'Run as Admin'. Click 'apply' > 'ok'.
Then right click the new executable again and select 'send to', and select 'desktop', thus creating a wee shortcut on the desktop for you.
And there we are, hopefully now you will be able to play Railroads without any problem.
Please note that I have be getting close to nearly 100,000 hits now and of those I've only had approx 200 people that this patch hasn't made a difference. Thats a neat little 0.2%. It has worked for both operating systems, 32 bit and 64 bit, so far but will not fix graphical errors. Please make sure that your drivers etc are upto date and you meet the minimum spec.
I am not a techno wizz nor work for Firaxis Technical Support. If this doesn't solve your problem email me using the link below and I will do my best to help but can not promise anything. I do not take responsibility for you trying this patch either.
